Munich

Germany has confirmed funding for more than 300 post-genomic research projects aimed at finding therapeutic targets for common diseases, including cancer and neurological disorders.

Germany's National Genome Research Network (NGFN) will receive €135 million (US$163 million) from the science ministry for its second phase, which runs from 2004 to 2007. This includes funding of six large disease-related ‘genome networks’, each involving molecular geneticists and clinical researchers, and new genomics infrastructures, including a ‘mouse clinic’ for analysing mutant mice and screening animal models of human diseases.

But some basic researchers are unhappy with the programme's insistence that they collaborate with clinicians, as genomics-based drugs are not even on the horizon. They claim that collaborations involve too much bureaucracy.

“All this networking is really an obsession of politicians,” a neuroscientist at one of Germany's leading research hospitals told Nature. “You end up feigning how well you collaborate with everybody, just to get funded. But it is actually disadvantaging the best groups.”

Other researchers support the approach. “Germany's genome initiative has greatly improved collaboration between clinicians and research facilities,” says Martin Hrabé de Angelis, who runs the German Mouse Clinic at the GSF national research centre in Munich.

Research will now focus on identifying candidate genes that might be linked to complex genetic disorders such as cancer or Alzheimer's disease. €10 million has been earmarked for small, high-risk projects.

Announcing the funding, research minister Edelgard Bulmahn pledged that significant funding for genome research will continue until at least 2010.

“Programme-oriented research is the current buzzword,” says Friedrich Luft, head of nephrology and hypertension at Charité, the medical faculty at Humboldt University in Berlin. “My intellectual activities are forced into ‘networks’. If I do not participate, my chances for funding are greatly diminished, if not zero.”

Hrabé de Angelis dismisses such gripes as “small-minded”. “Research à la ‘one gene, one postdoc’ also still exists,” he says. “But in a bigger context it is necessary to work together.”